Remembrance Day, Sami, Liliana, Edith and the others. Who are the last 11 survivors - Lifestyle

To remember oneself, to have testimony as a life mission, to be there with the marks on the arm and the gashes inside, and talk, and tell, and try again the pain another 100 unspeakable times, tell who is in front of you 'that's what it was the craziest of projects', the extermination of a 'race' and that of those who were different - homosexuals, the disabled, the Roma - and those who did not think like the dictator - the political opponents.

Herald of memory, as Senator

calls it

, is a harrowing 'job': one is publicly forced to remember, not to forget.

"I'm alive to testify, that's why I left the field, there was a bigger plan for me, and I'll go on remembering as long as I live," said

, 90 years old, in a beautiful television interview with Monica Maggioni on Rai1, being moved by every sentence, he is an excited but dry narrator.

The fact is that the more time passes the more the very few Holocaust survivors will also be dead.

And - on the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Day of Remembrance on January 27, in memory of when the symbol of all this evil was released 76 years ago, the Nazi extermination camp in Auschwitz - we must thank them, thanks for the immense effort of remember when perhaps they would like to be alone with their pain, dig deep, seek answers even to the 'shame' of having been saved, as Primo Levi said.

We are experiencing an agony of direct memory and perhaps for this reason it has become more excited, more aware that the latter are really the last.

Then there will remain the books, hundreds now in Italy and around the world, the diaries (the testimonies of Piero Terracina and Shlomo Venezia are kept in Pieve Santo Stefano by the Archive of the diaries and reported by Camillo Brezzi in the volume The last journey. From the racist laws to the Shoah (il Mulino, 2021), films, documentaries, foundations custodians of memory - from the

to the Memorial of the victims of anti-Jewish persecution 1943-45 with the indication and biographies of the

 directed from Liliana Picciotto, from the

Association

based in Milan and chaired by Liliana Segre, to the foundation of Steven Spielberg

 to the wonderful

projects

and the

profile

. The latter is an immense source: every day, several times a day, he prods readers by briefly telling the stories of 1.1 million inmates there, posting their pictures (babies in diapers, the elderly in poor shape, the young

in the plan of the years, an incredible agony) and explaining: when the person arrived, from where, what journey did he make to get to the extermination camp and how he died.

A truly incredible job.

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76th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camp of Auschwitz - Lifestyle

The memory will become indirect, the emotion entrusted to disappeared voices and that is why the survivors are restless, fear indifference, vain sacrifice and then they become even more tireless, trying to reach those young generations who have only them to see in life and a few pages in the history book. The children wonder how it could have happened, how the silence of those who continued to live was possible, albeit with the suffering of the war. Here are the answers to this.

According to the analysis of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities and the writer and historian Marcello Pezzetti, who looks after the museum in Rome, there are now about ten survivors in Italy. Here's who they are:

, 90 (from Rhodes to Birkenau at the age of 13. Her story is in the book by Walter Veltroni, Tana liberates all),

, 88 (writer, director, deported at 13 first in Auschwitz and then in other extermination camps: Dachau, Christianstadt, finally Bergen Belsen),

, 90 (senator for life, registration number 75190, of the 776 Italian children under the age of 14 who were deported to Auschwitz , was among the 25 survivors of the time), 

, 97 years old (serial number A 24324, last Venetian witness), the sisters of Fiume

I, respectively 81 and 83 years old, witness of the most absurd horror, that of the experiments by Mengele,

, also from Rijeka (serial number 89219, taken to Auschwitz and then to Bergen Belsen from the Risiera di San Sabba at just 11 as she will tell in the book A girl in Auschwitz, Mursia), 

82 years

born in Trieste in 1 928, Ravensbrück survivor,  

100 (born in Rhodes in 1920, survived Auschwitz),

86 (freshman in Auschwitz with tattoo number A-5372, is the last living Roman Jews deported after the death of Pietro Terracina),

86 years old

birth name Agata Herskovitz, born in Czechoslovakia, detained in Fossoli, then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Serial number A-5372, he has been an indefatigable witness to the Shoah for over 20 years with the students of Milan where he lives).

Recently

passed away

(on 19 December 2020, deported to Auschwitz at the age of 14, he was a consultant to Roberto Benigni for La vita è bella, his son Emanuele wrote The perfume of my father, released in these days for Piemme),

(died March 3, 2020),

(the 'boy' from Buchenvwald, who died in 2020)

(died December 8, 2019),

(died November 3, 2019).